Join us to celebrate Michelle Lesh and Raimond Gaita's special relationship to A Season of Death by Mark Raphael Baker. In conversation with Paul Barclay.

Mark entrusted the task of preparing A Season of Death for publication to Michelle Lesh, his wife and Melila’s mother, and to and her stepfather, Raimond Gaita. Michelle and Rai will discuss their special relationship to A Season of Death, the sorrow and the joy in it and Mark’s astonishing achievement in writing it.

About the author: Mark Raphael Baker (1959–2023) was the author of two memoirs, The Fiftieth Gate (1997) and Thirty Days (2017). He was associate professor at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation in the School of Philosophy, History, International Studies at Monash University.

About the book: In A Season of Death, readers of The Fiftieth Gate and Thirty Days will rediscover the many forms of Mark's humour, his candour and his depth of thought and feeling, albeit in a different key, as it must be when those virtues reveal themselves in expressions of vulnerability that fend off self-pity.

There is profound sorrow in this memoir but there is matching joy and much love, interwoven by a fine writer and thinker into a story that will deepen one's understanding of life.

Bookings: Tickets are $10 per person, redeemable off A Season of Death on the night. Please book here.